Business Transitions

Transition management refers to the decisions and actions in managing an organization during a relatively well-defined process or period of time. That transition period usually will have clear beginning and ending events even though the length of the transition can differ greatly considerably from one situation to another.

It is the presence of beginning and end points which distinguish transition management from day-to-day operational management and from a more open-ended practice known as change management.

Situational Assessment

Transition management must begin with a careful analysis of the management situation to clarify facts and to identify the best steps for the future. By its very nature, an organization’s transition phase is different from business-as-usual. Therefore, careful planning is required to avoid confusion, frustration, and wasted resources.

The planning should focus not just on the transition period, but also include careful attention to how to conduct the planning process, itself, such as who to include and what factors to consider. Some of these issues are illustrated in Figure 1, which depicts the major elements in planning for the transition. At a minimum, we recommend a careful review and analysis of the following types of issues.

Duration of Transition. How long is this period likely to last? Is there, or will there be, a recognizable beginning and end? If not, then how can those markers be established or engineered? This analysis does not have to be specific and too finely tuned, but duration might be a vital issue for the people who are affected by the transition – such as customers, employees, and vendors – and the anticipation of closure can serve as a powerful motivator when people are asked to make sacrifices for the sake of the transition’s success.

Outcomes from the Transition. What the manager envisions as the outcomes from a transition process needs as much detail and specificity as possible. In many cases, the outcome is the goal of the whole undertaking and it is the primary reason for employees, customers, and other stakeholders to become committed to the transition’s success. Outcomes might number just one event or benefit, or they might include dozens of benefits. In either case, the people in charge of the transition must have those outcomes clearly in mind during all interactions and communications in order to reinforce a common vision and direction of effort.

Anticipation of Challenges during Transition. The process of reflecting on the various ways that things might go awry is inherently difficult and unpleasant for many people. Successful business managers tend to be action oriented and positive in their thinking, while anticipating challenges can appear to be very time-consuming, negatively oriented, and speculative. Therefore, it’s tempting to give it short shrift and get on with the implementation on a full-scale basis. That could prove to be a crucial mistake, however, because many challenges are likely to be encountered during any complex undertaking. Many of those can be identified upfront based on what employees and managers have learned from past experience. To the extent any challenges can be considered before they occur, their affects can be mitigated and everyone involved will be better prepared to work for their resolution.

Commitment of Needed Resources. Typically, resources refer to time, people, equipment, and money – all of which are in constant demand in nearly any organization. Collectively, the resources that are made available to the transition effort set a limit on the capabilities for managing that effort. In particular, the allocation of too few resources can present insurmountable obstacles by preventing vital work from being assigned and completed when it’s needed. Many methods of forecasting the needs for financial and other resources are available but the process seems to be an art as much as a science. One approach that we recommend is to break down (or segment) as much of the entire transition process as possible into reasonable, discrete phases for the projection of budgets, staffing, and equipment. The key point is to invest sufficient attention to each of the major tasks within each phase (including contingencies and any escalations in pricing, labor, supplies, etc.) to realistically estimate your resource needs over the transition’s full duration.

Who to Involve and How

One of the first steps in managing a transition is the identification of the people that are affected by the changes being planned, the nature of the affect they might experience, and whether their help might be needed in some way to ensure success. This step is often referred to as a Stakeholder Analysis, with the term “stakeholder” being pretty broadly defined as anyone who has a vested interest in the success of the transition. Typically, this might include the managers and employees of the organization, the major customers or service recipients who depend on the organization in one way or another, vendors, and business partners. In the public sector, stakeholders might also include elected officials and a variety of public interest and political groups.

Among the immediate goals of the stakeholder analysis is to identify the people who are important to the success of the organization during the transition. Some of those people might need to be involved in some way, like offering assistance, facilitating the process, or even participating on a transition steering committee. Other stakeholders might only need to be informed of what is happening on a periodic basis and recognize that the transition could entail changes to their normal interactions with the organization; their form of assistance might be as simple as being patient with the changes being introduced and having a general understanding of what to expect.

The process of stakeholder analysis needs to be conducted carefully enough to identify all of the organization’s major stakeholders and to clarify their characteristics and relationships that might be important for the management of the transition. Examples of these characteristics include the following:

Perceptions– how members of each group of stakeholders regard their relationship with the organization, with special emphasis placed on understanding the perspective of the stakeholders. This might include consideration of the history between the organization and the stakeholder group, e.g., whether relationships have been fraught with conflict or collaboration. It also includes analyzing the degree that stakeholders recognize the interest they might have in the welfare of the organization and the success of the transition.

Leverage Points– these are the possible ways in which each of the stakeholder groups might be persuaded to assist in the transition to ensure its success. Because each of the stakeholders has some degree of interest in seeing the transition succeed, the transition manager must be able to:

Reinforce awareness of the mutual benefits of the stakeholder’s relationship and how each stakeholder stands to benefit from the transition’s success.

Negotiate specific actions that the stakeholder will agree to take for the purpose of assisting in the transition.

Taking Action

On the surface, it might seem as though taking a series of decisive actions would be the key in successful transition management. This is a common inclination for managers in much of industry and government who have been so successful by relying on a bias for action when getting things done. Under our approach, however, it can be seen that taking action begins only once the manager has completed sufficient preparation to provide clear and consistent direction to the rest of the organization.

One of the biggest sources of frustration, and one of the most difficult challenges for the transition manager, is to get the transition plan right from the very beginning. In order to motivate people to accept and support change, the manager has to show consistency in words and action, and protect against wasted effort and the need for rework that can be caused by miscommunication and changes in direction.

For conceptual purposes, we distinguish between two aspects of action during the transition. One of those is comprised of the actions that support and motivate change on a wide-scale basis in the organization which we call “foundational actions”. As their name implies, these actions provide the overall foundation for numerous types of “targeted actions” that address specific shorter-term goals and that often have more concrete results. These two categories of action are illustrated in Figure 2, foundational and target actions. Figure 2 shows a set of targeted actions, designed to achieve specific goals, being supported by the four major types of foundational actions that facilitate the collective change process in transition management.

Foundational Actions

While every organization and each transition is different from any other, we have found that there are many points of similarity across the individual situations. One of those points is the role in transition management that is played by actions that support the entire process of change and transition in the organization. These we have labeled Foundational Actions.

Communications

One of the first major steps for a transition manager to take is to announce that a transition is coming and then to explain what that means to all of the parties who will be involved in the process. During many types of transitions managers and employees will be expected to learn new procedures, acquire new skills, and to assume new work roles.

These and other changes will need to be continuously reinforced by the transition manager in practically all forms of formal and informal communication including business memoranda, bulletins, and staff meetings. The transition manager also must take clear steps to ensure that managers and supervisors down the line are also on board and that they effectively guide and reinforce employees’ efforts to adopt their new roles and responsibilities related to the transition.

The repetition of messages is often overlooked as an essential component of communications. Managers tend to assume that once they’ve sent out the message then people will understand it. Especially in major transitions, this can be a fatal mistake. Even when they’ve been told something repeatedly, people will still need reiterations of the changes envisioned, the new goals and procedures, and for reassurances that they are doing their part in support of the whole task.

Visioning

The vision of the new, or post-transition, organization is one of the most powerful sources of motivation for the managers and employees who are asked to play a role in the transition’s success. The vision articulates the promises offered by all of the extra efforts and adaptations to the various changes that are part of the transition process.

In most cases, the vision for the transition is a product of the transition manager’s own thoughtful analysis and creativity. Whether or not other people participate in the visioning process, the ultimate ownership of the vision has to be assumed by the highest person in charge – the transition manager. Virtually all communications and decisions have to be made within the context of achieving that vision because that is the central driving force for the whole effort.

Earlier, we discussed the importance of articulating the goals for the transition during the process of preparing for transition management. In many ways, visioning is an extension of those goals. The vision helps to bring alive the results from a successful transition in the minds of managers, employees, and other stakeholders.

This vision must become everyone’s shared collective goal and, to do that, the vision must be continuously communicated, reinforced, and clearly linked to all of the individual tasks that constitute the entire process. Instilling and maintaining this common vision one of the most important roles of the transition manager.

Rewards

Recognizing and rewarding goal-oriented activities is vital for sustaining the efforts and commitment of managers, employees, and everyone else who is involved in making the transition successful. Rewards reinforce behaviors that are productive and desirable. At the same time, the absence of rewards serves to diminish non-productive and undesirable behaviors.

A wide range of outcomes can be effective rewards, and we often distinguish between formal and informal rewards. Formal rewards are tangible outcomes like official commendations, job promotions, and financial bonuses. Informal rewards tend to be subtler and they can include recognition, handshakes, praise, smiles and nods, pats on the back, compliments, and a variety of other gestures and signs of approval.

It is interesting to note that the use of informal rewards costs an organization virtually nothing – they’re free – even though, in practice, managers tend to rely heavily on the distribution of formal rewards to sustain employee commitment and motivation.

Actively rewarding. Supervisors and managers are sometimes surprised to learn that the use of rewards, particularly the use of informal rewards, is one of the most under-utilized tools they have available for the support of any given transition. To get the most out of this tool, managers must actively seek out opportunities to reward positive outcomes and the behaviors that led to those outcomes – not just sit back and wait for them to happen. In this sense, finding appropriate opportunities to reward employee performance becomes an important goal for managers and supervisors.

Setting goals for finding opportunities. An important goal of the transition manager is to ensure that middle managers and frontline supervisors actively seek out, recognize, and reward appropriate efforts and behavior on the part of employees. Like many key responsibilities of managers, one effective way to reinforce this role is for the transition manager to set specific goals for supervisors’ individual and group performance and to follow up with consistent monitoring and coaching. The transition manager must be confident that supervisors are aware of their reward goals, that they know how to pursue and attain them, and that they are actively seeking out opportunities to reward their employees for transition progress.

Risk Factors

Managing risk is the fourth and final foundational activity in transition management. This action actually consists of a complex collection of factors that include recognition, cost-benefits analysis, situational assessment, decision making, and follow-up.

Organizations differ considerably from one another in the ways that they define and manage risk. Some organizations are highly risk-averse and consistently decide to err on the side of safety. Other organizations actively support risk taking to the extent that those risks are reasonable and can lead to outcomes that are sufficiently attractive. In either case, it is important to remember that risk is unavoidable and is inherent in any business situation – it comes both from taking action and also from inaction.

There is no one “correct” level of risk. Each organization works in a slightly different environment and assumes the types of risks that are best suited for them. The key to success for the transition manager is to understand how the organization has handled risk in the past, what approaches it supports, and what risks are considered to be off-limits – and then work within that framework.

Targeted Actions

As outlined earlier, foundational actions are designed to support the entire transition process. Targeted actions, on the other hand, are sets of specific activities that are aimed at achieving discrete goals, objectives, and outcomes. In a transition designed for a major conversion of technology, we have identified four of the most common sets of targeted action and we will now describe them in some detail.

Expectations

One of the first consequences that follow the announcement of a major organizational transition is the redefinition of what is expected of people on the job.

Managers are expected to communicate and explain to employees the many changes in work processes and work conditions that stem from the transition.

Employees are expected to accept, learn, and adapt to new procedures, operate new equipment, and possibly to explain to customers and other outside parties what the transition means and its potential benefits for them.

All members of the organization are expected to support the transition and to contribute in one way or another towards its successful completion.

Definition and clarification of roles. Changes in work processes and equipment often entail a formal redefinition of work roles and duties. When job responsibilities change then those changes eventually will need to be reflected in formal job descriptions and task specifications. In addition, some transitions entail changes not just in work duties but also in the roles that certain employees play in the organization – for example, new jobs might be created while other jobs might be eliminated.

All of these changes have to be clearly communicated and consistently reinforced before productivity can reach acceptable levels. Being close to the action, frontline supervisors are among the people who are most affected by these changes and this group might need extra support and assistance while managing changes in work processes.

Culture, habits, resistance to change. One of the lesser-understood aspects of organizations is culture. The concept of organizational culture refers to the total collection of stories, history, supervisory practices, work habits, and group norms that often serves to distinguish one organization from another.

While it has been difficult to quantify culture, it is relatively easy to observe, at least on a small scale. It is reflected in the way that individuals and groups relate to – and interact with – one another, how they regard their working conditions and work products, and what they say about work when talking to friends, relatives, and acquaintances at social gatherings.

Because so many aspects of organizational culture are unwritten, they can be very easy to overlook or to simply forget about. There are no ready-made “checklists” for managing culture effectively. However, changing an organization and managing a successful transition often mean making at least some changes to long-standing work habits and procedures. When undertaken on an isolated basis, without enough consideration of established habits and expectations, such changes can conflict with culture and violate real (if unwritten) normative expectations. The result can take form of resistance to change whereby employees become suspicious and resentful of management decisions, purposefully withhold support and commitment to the transition, and sometimes wind up costing expensive time and rework.

In part, managing an organization’s culture involves repeated communication about changes in work roles, work habits, and work rewards. It also requires leading by example in ways that reinforce the transition’s direction and the promise offered by the vision of the transition’s success. It can be a long and complicated process that requires both patience and persistence on the part of the transition manager and the management team.

Developmental Engineering

A major technology transition for an organization can often require substantial changes in the mix of skills that employees must possess to work effectively. New technology is often more sophisticated than older technology. Consequently, the ability to operate and maintain the various components or parts of the new technology might be substantially different what was required from an organization’s legacy system.

For a transition manager, this can mean either developing new talent from the organization's existing pool of employees or obtaining that talent from the outside. Either way, the transition manager will need to have a clear understanding of the competencies required by employees to work satisfactorily under the new system.

Identification of key competencies. A technique known as competency modeling is one of the most effective ways of identifying, analyzing, and defining the job-related qualifications that employees need in order to perform successfully in a given job. Competency models begin by gathering detailed information on the work tasks that employees perform, and distinguishing between those tasks on the basis of relevant work dimensions such as the frequency of performance, difficulty of performing, and consequence of error.

For the tasks that are identified as the most important in the job, the next step is to identify the specific areas of knowledge, skills, abilities and other personal characteristics (KSAOs) that employees must have in order to perform each task successfully. Collectively, those KSAOs are referred to as work competencies.

It is normal for some competencies to be acquired once a person is already on the job. For example, procedures that are specific to a unique or rare piece of equipment might be acquired only through on-the-job training.

In contrast, other competencies must be brought to the job from the outside because they are unlikely to be acquired once a person is working. Basic academic skills in reading, writing, and arithmetic are examples of competencies that are usually required on the first day of employment and that are not taught in on-the-job training courses.

Development needs and training programs. The transition manager will need to ensure the availability of sufficient talent to operate all aspects of the new technology that is being introduced. A detailed competency model will help to identify the specific competencies required, and that is a starting point for developmental engineering. In most cases, however, new competencies will need to be developed internally or acquired from the outside when they do not already exist within the organization. This determination must come from a developmental needs analysis which takes into account factors like the following in order to find effective strategies for skill development.

Time, difficulty, and practicality of skill acquisition through training and development initiatives. Some competencies can be built and strengthened through formal training courses or through programmed sets of work experiences. Sets of standardized work tasks offer a good example of complex behaviors that can often be acquired on the job with the help of formal training materials and mentors.

Methods of development, e.g., classroom instruction, self-paced instruction, educational settings, on-the-job training. For competencies that can be acquired once someone is already on the job, the mode of development can often accelerate learning and proficiency.

Some competencies are sufficiently well defined that they can be thoroughly presented in training manuals, for example. Computer-based training is an instructional mode that has seen extensive progress in recent years. It can offer many advantages over more traditional classroom training because of self-pacing, standardization, and flexibility in administration.

Available resources for development, e.g., commercially available programs, local colleges, self-development through reading and practice. Traditionally, a wide range of training and development has been designed and paid for by employers in order to meet their needs for specific work-related skills.

This tradition seems to be changing. Increasingly, managers are seeing professional training and development as a shared responsibility between employers and employees instead of something that employees simply “receive” as part of their job. Professional and higher-level skills especially are becoming an area of employees’ responsibility to acquire and develop on their personal time instead of on company time.

Metrics

Up to this point, we have covered quite a range of tasks for which the transition manager will be responsible throughout the transition process. Depending on the specific nature of the transition being managed and the organization involved, some tasks might be eliminated while other tasks added.

Regardless of the specific mix of tasks, however, is the need for the transition manager to keep track of how well all of the vital tasks are going. This is where the role of performance measurement comes in.

Criterion development. The first question for the transition manager to address is what to measure, “What are the most important criteria for success in this transition?” Ideally, this analysis will be as open-ended as possible so that all options can be considered.

From among all of the possible criteria, the manager needs to consider what data might be used and collected to provide a practical measure of performance – both what data might be available already and what data can be obtained from custom-designed measurement.

Finally, consideration should be made of the feasibility of measurement, such as how costly, intrusive, or reliable the various measures are likely to be. A few examples of criteria that frequently are used in tracking progress during transitions are shown in Table 1.

Performance measurement. Once we have identified what to measure, the next question is how to measure it accurately. Just as some sources of data are more reliable than other sources, some people are also in positions to provide more accurate assessment of certain types of criteria.

Tasks that are undertaken as an individual contributor can be validly assessed from the point of view of the employee, the customer, and the supervisor. Each perspective will provide an evaluation from a slightly different set of criteria. ﻿

This is illustrated in Figure 3, which shows how each person might view the same work product or service. While all three people might see the identical work outcome, each person has a certain set of criteria in mind as being the most important. If measures from these three people are being used at one time, it is easy to see how they first need to agree on what is most important before they can provide consistent measures. ndertaken as an individual contributor can be validly assessed from the point of view of the employee, the customer, and the supervisor. Each perspective will provide an evaluation from a slightly different set of criteria.

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Differences in perspective arise with many measures of work performance, especially when those measures depend on the observer’s interpretation. When performance measures come from people (as opposed to automated or mechanical sources), then those people need to have the following:

Opportunities to observe the performance on many different occasions.

Both an understanding and agreement on the specific criteria that are intended for measurement.

Skill in using any instruments or special procedures in providing the measures (e.g., instructions and the use of rating scales).

Confidence that the measures they provide will not be the basis for retaliation or other negative outcomes to themselves.

Most measures of job performance that are used in organizations are notably weak on the final bullet, above. Because formal appraisals of job performance are used for so many different purposes in organizations, they are almost always shared with employees in the context of administrative decisions where the employee has an important stake in the outcome (e.g., salary increase, promotion, job security). This context often serves to reduce the value of the measurement as a learning opportunity and to introduce a bias (usually toward leniency) in the measurement process.

Feedback

The last targeted action shown in Figure 2 is feedback. A step that is often ignored or abbreviated in the measurement process is the fairly obvious one of actually collecting, analyzing, and feeding back the results of measurement to the people involved.

The measures that are available on performance can be used as “knowledge of results” in education, providing useful information about needs for further improvement and reinforcement. Preferably, the more objective the measures are

Resistance to measure usually stems from fear or threat. If the measures turn out to be low, then someone must be to blame. This scenario is highly counterproductive. The transition manager needs to first look at performance measures as reflective of the system in which the performance occurs, and use those measures as a basis to assess the system first, not to assess individuals. Sometimes, the best use of individuals in this process is as a source of further information about the reasons why performance measures might have been low – either in terms of the measures, themselves, or in terms of the performance that was low. , and the more valid they are related to the performance being measured, the easier they will be for people to accept and use.

Feedback also must be communicated about progress of the transition as a whole, and the people who need to receive that feedback includes anyone who is committed to and supportive of the transition’s success.

When feedback is based on relevant measurement, it provides information about what has happened, how well things have gone, where improvements are needed, and what more needs to be done. It also serves to update people in the challenges being faced by the transition, and whether any changes might be in order to further facilitate the process. Perhaps most important is the motivational aspect of feedback when stakeholders feel that they are in the loop and have the ability to provide assistance of one kind or another.

This latter benefit ﻿can range from simply offering words of encouragement, to redoubling efforts aimed at improving quality and volume of output, to voluntary interventions from stakeholders who normally would not get involved.﻿

Needs for Transitions

Any number of events can bring forth the need for a transition. Their common feature is that they all present a major challenge for the future success of the organization and they signal the need for a significant change from how the business normally operates. Some of the more common events include the following.

Conversions of Major Technology Systems. The adoption of new technology systems is becoming a common occurrence in business and government. New technology is introduced on a small scale practically every day. The change of a core system, however, can have such a large impact on the business that it takes on a special type of status.

A change in the major systems of an organization can, in effect, redefine the business and how the business is conducted. In these types of situations, the success of the technology change can be vital to the organization’s future and every effort must be invested to ensure a smooth development and deployment process.

Loss of CEO. The departure of a chief executive often begins a transitional period that presents both challenges and opportunities for organizations. This is particularly true if the departure is unexpected and a management succession plan has not been implemented.

When the departure is an unplanned change – such as death, illness, leaving for another job, or termination – the organization may feel a crisis that requires that an executive search be conducted immediately. However, the organization may not be ready because of pressing business, operational demands, merger discussions, or financial challenges.

Changes in Core Strategies. Once in a great while, a business can redefine itself and make major changes to its core strategies of doing business. For example, some lines of products or services might once have been profitable but are not likely to be so again so the core business must be redefined if the organization is to continue to prosper.

However, customers and other stakeholders might need to be convinced to go along with such a redefinition but they might not see things in quite the same light. That could present serious challenges particularly if those customers are benefiting from the status quo.

Acquisitions and Divestitures. One of the most visible and time-sensitive changes in the private sector is the purchase and assimilation of new operations (acquisitions), and the spinning off or sale of specific lines of business (divestitures).

In both situations, the operations usually have to keep operating sm

oothly during the process of change in order to continue serving customers and retaining market share. Retaining key personnel and customers is often a significant challenge during such transitions.

Many events can precipitate the beginning of a major transition period; these are just a few of the more common ones. Managing the transition can be both rewarding and stressful. With too little planning, it can create an atmosphere of uncertainty for everyone: employees, the management team, and outside stakeholders.

While there are many complex issues that will need to be addressed, there are few professionals who possess all the skills of the team at Advent Consulting Associates.